Escoffier: The King of Chefs by Kenneth James 320pp, Hambledon and London, £19.95

A wise old cook, veteran of work ruined by guttering fires and smoking chimneys, observed the essential difference between males and females in the kitchen. Men treat a meal as a problem to be solved; women as a series of things to be cooked. Men are preoccupied with tools, performance and manual dexterity. Women just press on. It's the old antagonism of means and ends.

You see it even today. Compare Delia and Jamie. He chops like a wizard, stretches dough with athleticism; she stands mute at the stove. And you know that Japanese cookery is the construct of male minds once you've taken on board their 35 ways of slicing a radish.

Chefs organise, cooks cook, and the master chef of the modern age is Auguste Escoffier whose books listing fifty sauces for a fillet of sole, 82 smashing ways of dealing with salt cod and 325 sautees for chicken have been the Pentateuch of chefs the world over since his death in 1935. After all, if you can't get artichokes yet the shops have turnips, you have to find a solution or luncheon won't be served.

Escoffier's career is a paradigm of international cooking. Born on the Cote d'Azur, he graduated to Parisian restaurants by means of hard apprenticeship and application. Success in that city might merely have been crowned by purchase of his own restaurant back in his native region, but service at the front during the Franco-Prussian war - his meals for officers under fire were miracles of improvisation - interrupted the inevitable, and wider horizons were opened up by wealthy clients and his falling in with Cesar Ritz, hotelier extraordinary.

For 20 years they were partners in a succession of ventures across three continents until Ritz went into a mental and nervous decline after 1902 - perhaps accelerated by the last-minute cancellation of Edward VII's coronation (a dicky appendix), with 500 lunches already simmering on the hob. These men were cool operators, the Mr Fix-its of the late Victorian hotel industry. Just as Thomas Cook's millions were made on the back of technical improvement to mass transportation, so Ritz and Escoffier were lucky to be around at a time that the construction of giant hotels - palaces of the people as well as of royalty - had never been easier.

Steel-framed, complete with lifts and private bathrooms (the first en-suite extravaganza in London was the Carlton, open in 1899), on a scale never before contemplated, they filled the flesh-pots of the world faster than a post-war housing estate. And Ritz and Escoffier had the management team, as well as the chefs and culinary programme, to make these monsters run like clockwork. Escoffier had the art of setting up a new kitchen so well-refined that he could do a new hotel from standing start to first commercial opening in six weeks. The Savoy, Claridges, the Carlton, Ritzes here, there and everywhere, the Monte Carlo Grand and the Grand National in Rome, not to mention a useful sideline in cooking on ocean liners: all grist to the mill.

Celebrity chefs are not new. Here, Alexis Soyer found fame in the 1850s as cook at the Reform Club, grandiloquent restaurateur, mass-educator in nutrition and diet, and zealot of efficiency at the front in the Crimea. Earlier still, in Europe, Antonin Careme had cooked for every crowned head around, written bibles of gastronomy, and converted cooking to a public art. Escoffier was also more than just a cook, well meriting celebrity. He wrote books, founded journals, ceaselessly promoted the art of French cooking, dabbled in politics (advocating a national fund to relieve poverty), got down dirty (Jamie-style) with the workers to improve their dietetic lot, and commercialised himself in a range of sauces and canned goods just as Paul Bocuse and Michel Guerard have done to this day. His infinite consultancies presaged the modern chef's career path. And he always worked in a frock coat and cravate: executive is, I think, the term.

Kenneth James canters us through this life with little deviation and a lot of menus. Every chapter has its interlude of gastro-history, inserted perhaps for the reader to draw breath after another half-dozen triumphant yet repetitious dinners. (Escoffier was a master at variations: 100 things to do with peaches - including laying them breast-like on a bed of vanilla ice-cream, with wild-strawberry nipples and calling it "Coupe V¿nus".)

However, Escoffier also played his cards pretty close to the chest: his emotional life was a zero, unless he had as mistress Sarah Bernhardt or Rosa Lewis (the duchess of Jermyn Street, a true original: a woman cook with style who ended owning the Cavendish Hotel). Lips have stayed firmly sealed. As they have at the Savoy whence have emanated tales of him being on the take during his time there with Cesar Ritz as general manager.

James is unwilling to take the claims of embezzlement too seriously and certainly Escoffier was never a rich man. In fact, for one so evidently intelligent, he seemed always to be gulled by business associates. Signs here too, therefore, of the modern era, for who has not known chefs of undeniable brilliance who have yet been left like punch-drunk fighters in the gutter of despair as their working lives draw to a close?

· Tom Jaine is the editor of Petit Propos Culinaire, a semi-academic periodical concerned with the history of food (for details telephone 01803 712269).